Chapter 2 #2
Isak crossed to us, and Gabrielle said, "Isak Kingman, this is Clover Freeman, our new dance and cheer team coach. She was previously the cheer captain at Chadwick University."
His hand came out and I shook it. His grip was warm and unhurried, the kind that didn't perform strength because it didn't need to.
His touch made my skin do a flicker-flash of noticing just how fine this man was. I was immediately filing that under unhelpful and irrelevant and we are not doing this, Clover Brenee Freeman.
"Nice to meet you," he said.
The back of my brain sat up very straight.
Something about his voice. It tugged at the edge of a memory I couldn't locate, but it was warm and safe and I knew it from somewhere.
"You too," I said. Professional. Clean. Completely normal tone of a woman who was not currently running an emergency background check on why his voice sounded so damn familiar.
Umm, duh. He was on TV all the time. Who in the sports world hadn't heard his voice?
He was looking at me with an expression that in my experience usually lived on the faces of men who were very accustomed to women reacting to them and had gotten bored of it.
Which was annoying, and also possibly exactly the energy I needed him to have because it made the next part significantly easier.
Because I did not do football players. Not anymore.
That was the rule. The rule that was going to keep right on existing regardless of jawlines or warm handshakes or voices that snagged on something both comforting and exciting.
I released his hand.
He put it directly into the pocket of his jeans.
"Monty's waiting for us in the small conference room," Gabrielle said.
"Right." His eyes moved to me for just a second, still that careful, held-at-distance look. "Good luck with the squad," he said in a voice that was extremely even, and then he turned and walked away down the corridor.
I watched him go, definitely not ogling his football butt for one second exactly before I remembered I was a professional.
Nope. Not going there.
The knock on my office door came at three-fifteen while I was rearranging my spreadsheet of potentially returning squad members for the third time.
"Come in."
She was about my height, dark skin, braids pulled back in a bun without a single strand even attempting escape. She wore a Tigers warm-up jacket over workout clothes and had the posture of someone who'd been trained to hold themselves that way.
"Zahra Smith," she said. "I was one of the captains last season."
"Clover Freeman." I stood and extended my hand. "I've been hoping to meet you."
Her eyes did the thing I recognized because I'd been on the receiving end of it all my life. The quick scan. The recalibration. The microscopic adjustment of whatever she'd been expecting versus what was standing in front of her.
I let her have it. I didn't flinch and I didn't fill the silence and I didn't perform competently for her. I just waited, steady and ready, and let Zahra Smith take her time.
She sat without being invited to. I respected that more than I was going to tell her.
"I've been on this squad for four years," she said.
"I had a good working relationship with Coach Daniels.
I built my training schedule around her program, and a lot of the other women did too.
" She folded her hands on my desk and looked at me directly.
"I'd like to know what we're walking into with you. "
Reasonable. Professional. Fair.
I made my decision in about two seconds.
I could be vague, keep it general, say we'll talk at auditions.
She'd accept that and leave and I wouldn't have to watch her face do whatever it was about to do.
But that wasn't why I'd taken this job. I believed in this vision.
I wasn't going to hide it from the woman I hoped would return as one of my captains.
"We're going to rebuild this squad with body diversity as a foundation, not a footnote," I said.
"With women who've been told there wasn't a place for them.
Community recruitment beyond the traditional pipeline.
We're going out into Cincinnati to find athletes who've never thought to audition for something like this because the door's never been open to them. "
I watched her face the whole time.
The professionalism didn't disappear. Something underneath it did.
"That's Gabrielle Jackson's idea," she said.
"One I've been tasked to proponent. And I will because I believe in it."
Zahra studied me for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was still controlled, but the precision of it had a different quality. Sharper. Like something had been decided.
"So Gabrielle Jackson, who has been the new president of this team for one hot minute, who has never worked in professional cheer or danced a day in her life, has decided that the squad her father built needs to be, what? A social experiment." Not a question. "And she's hired you to run it."
"She hired me because I believe in—"
"Because you fit the narrative." Still controlled. Still precise. "A plus-size woman coaching a body diverse squad? That's a really great press release for an owner who needs people to believe she's different from every other League owner who's ever sat in that box."
She tilted her head slightly. "What happens to the women you recruit when the press cycle ends? When the front office gets nervous about the numbers and the fanbase pushes back and the experiment stops being good for the brand?"
My mouth opened.
She wasn't finished.
"I've watched women pour everything into this squad.
Rearrange their whole lives. Train through injuries and family emergencies because this mattered to them.
And Coach Daniels is gone with no explanation, and now there's a new vision, and the women who gave everything to the old one—" She stopped.
Pressed her lips together for a beat. "I need to know if your loyalty is to these women or to Gabrielle Jackson's project. "
My office went very quiet.
She was right about almost everything. That was the part I couldn't argue with and couldn't fix tonight. I'd been in this city for a week, this job for a day. I had a vision and a spreadsheet and a conviction I'd carried my whole life, and none of that added up to diddly-squat for her. Not yet.
"Zahra, I took this job because I was the little girl who got told this world wasn't built for her, and I've spent my whole life proving otherwise, and I want to build something that means the next little girl doesn't have to prove it before she's allowed in.
I believe in you and these women before I met them.
" I held her gaze. "And I can tell you that if you come to auditions, you're going to see something that will answer your question better than I can sitting here. "
Zahra stood, picked up her jacket from the back of the chair, and said, "I'll be at auditions. Because I'm a professional." She moved to the door. "But I want you to know that I've heard a lot of people say the right things in this building. Saying them isn't the same as meaning them."
The door clicked shut, quiet, closed very deliberately by someone who had made their point.
I sat at my desk and looked at the small trophy on the bookshelf behind me.
First place at regionals, junior year of high school, and thought about every room I'd ever walked into that had recalibrated when it saw me.
Every gentle redirect. Every polite version of being told that this world is not quite for you.
Zahra Smith was protecting women from being hurt by a system that had never been built for them.
So was I.
We just had to find our way to that common goal.
I turned back to my spreadsheet and started actually working toward the vision.
I called my mom on the drive home because some days required immediate debriefing and this was aggressively one of them.
She picked up on the second ring like she’d been waiting for this call and was not going to pretend otherwise. "Kidlet. How was the first day?"
So I told her. The parts I could make funny I made funny, and she laughed in the right places, and I was in the middle of describing Brock Whyte and his very sincere compliments that somehow left me feeling like I'd been handed a job description I hadn't applied for, when I heard the familiar scrape of a barstool in the background.
"Put it on speaker," my dad said. "I want to hear."
My mom's sigh was the fond kind, thirty-five years of fond, and then the quality of the call shifted and my father's voice came through warm and close.
"Clover. First day. How's Gabrielle? How's the facility?"
"Gabrielle is great. The facility is—"
"You see Kingman yet? How did his foot look? The camera doesn't always capture the footwork, I need a ground-level assessment."
"Morgan." My mom again. Mild as weather.
"I'm asking a reasonable question. The kid's completion rate in a pocket under pressure is historically significant, I want to know if he's got the footwork to back it up in person or if it's—"
"He seems," I said carefully, "to have functional feet."
My dad laughed, big and genuine, the laugh I'd been making him do since I was old enough to understand that making my father laugh was one of the great achievements available to a human being. "She's funny. Tory, our kid is funny."
"I know," my mom said. "I was there when she got that."
"The Tigers are going to turn it around this year.
" The familiar frequency, the one that meant he'd settled into pundit mode and was going to be there for a while.
"Those boys will turn the underdogs into top dogs.
That is if Theo Roper can actually coach at this level— Clover, you keep an eye on that situation.
You're going to have a front row seat to something historic. "
Front row seat.
I made an ugly duck face for a second. Just a second.
"I'll keep my eyes open," I said.
Front row seat to something historic that the football players were going to do.
Not how did it feel to walk into that building. Not tell me about the women you want to recruit. Not what are you going to build there that's historic too, baby girl.
I knew what he'd say if I pointed it out. He'd say he already knew I was going to do something incredible because I always did, and he'd mean every word of it.
I drove home.
Tig had the blanket from the back of the couch arranged in the center of which he was now sitting, satisfied like a cat who'd had a very productive afternoon.
"Aww, you built your nest," I said.
He blinked.
I pulled a pillow from the other side of the couch and sat there because I'd learned through experience that disturbing the nest was not worth it. He rearranged himself immediately onto my legs, turned three times, and settled with his full weight across my thighs.
I grabbed my phone for some scrolling, because it was now illegal for me to get up off the couch while Tig was on my lap.
Cat Daddy was still there between Camille and Dad's assistant, right where I'd left him when I'd decided to be smart.
Instead of scrolling through my FaceSpace or Instasnap, my mind was already scrolling through my day.
Monty Whyte's weird micro-agressions that I was sure he had no clue he'd committed while meeting me.
Zahra Smith and her very fair question about whose side I was on and the fact that I hadn't been able to answer it well enough.
My dad and the front row seat and my very long seven-minute drive home.
And then I thought about a man in a helmet who had climbed a tree in motorcycle boots without being asked, and talked me down branch by branch by asking my name, and caught me like he'd been waiting at the bottom of that tree his whole life.
Who had called me Clover once in a voice that sounded like he was trying it out and deciding he liked it.
He had zero context for who I was or wasn't.
That felt, tonight, like the most important thing in the world.
I opened the contact. Stared at it. I put the phone face down on the cushion.
Tig shifted his weight and purred.
"Don't look at me like that," I said.
He wasn't looking at me like anything. He was a cat.
I left the phone face down. I was being smart because really, who texts a guy who won't tell her his name or let her see his face?
And also I was so, so dumb, because I knew I was going to text.